GOP has its own layabouts

Monday

Jul 28, 2014 at 6:00 AMJul 28, 2014 at 6:49 AM

By Clive McFarlane TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

Conservative lawmakers have often accused President Obama of trying to turn the country into a welfare state. The truth, however, is that the president's polices have turned them into a bunch of welfare recipients.

I give you exhibit A: former Massachusetts U.S. senator Scott Brown. He is in New Hampshire running for a U.S Senate seat and his top agenda is the same as it was when he upset Martha Coakley to win a run-off election to fill Ted Kennedy's senatorial seat here and when he lost that seat to Elizabeth Warren — repealing Obamacare.

But if repealing the law wasn't politically viable when it was first enacted, it is downright foolish to be advocating that possibility now that it is almost fully implemented. So Brown's new approach is to say the law is not working.

He knows this is not so. In March he had visited the home of New Hampshire Republican state Rep. Herb Richardson and his wife, Rita.

"Obamacare is a monstrosity," Brown told the couple, only to be confronted with some facts that he has apparently forgotten. According to an article in the Coos County Democrat, Brown was told that Richardson was injured on the job and was forced to live on his $2,000 per month workers' compensation for an extended period.

The couple, according to the article, had to pay $1,100 a month to maintain their health insurance coverage under the federal COBRA law, leaving them very little on which to live. Thanks to subsidies under the healthcare law, however, the couple was able to get insurance that covered them both for $136 a month.

"Thank God for Obamacare," Rita Richardson reportedly told Brown.

This is not the first time Brown's hypocrisy on Obamacare has been exposed. As a senator, he voted three times to repeal the law, only to acknowledged that his then 23-year-old daughter was one of the millions of young people benefiting from an Obamacare provision allowing young people to stay on their parents' health care plan until age 26.

Conservative lawmakers' duplicity is not limited to Obamacare.

Earlier this month, addressing a crowd in Austin, Texas, President Obama noted that American "businesses have added nearly 10 million new jobs over the past 52 months. Our housing is rebounding. Our auto industry is booming. Manufacturing is adding more jobs than any time since the 1990s. The unemployment rate is at the lowest point it's been since September of 2008.

"A lot of this was because of the resilience and hard work of the American people," the president said.

"But some of it had to do with decisions we made to build our economy on a new foundation. And those decisions are paying off. We're more energy independent. For the first time in nearly 20 years, we produce more oil here at home than we buy from abroad. The world's largest oil and gas producer isn't Russia; it's not Saudi Arabia — it's the United States of America."

A number of economists have pointed out the dramatic difference between how the US — with an expansionary fiscal policy — and Europe — with a greater emphasis on belt-tightening — have recovered from the Great Recession.

The recession, for example, has lingered longer in Europe, and unemployment rates have remained stubbornly high there.

Not surprisingly, while conservative lawmakers are benefiting greatly from the U.S. recovery, they are still clamoring for the austerity approach taken by Europe. This makes them the country's largest group of deadbeats. They are reaping the benefits of a economic recovery to which they have contributed nothing stimulating.